It’s the little bits that serve to make a history ……

If you are of certain age, born in the second half of the last century who grew up during the early years of television then the chances are that the wireless played a big part in your life.

1950s elegance

Along with newspapers the BBC remained the primary source for news and entertainment.  It was there in school with a variety of educational programmes, at your place of work with Music While You Work and offered up a heap of comedy and drama broadcasts which stand the test of time.  They were innovative, and funny and set many comedians on a path to fame and success.

Advert for radios, 1949

The list of radio shows from my youth tumble over each other but in a way culminate with Two Way Family Favourites that request programme designed to link families at home in the UK with British Forces serving in West Germany and other places overseas.*

It was just part of Sunday, sandwiched either side of Sunday dinner, beginning with that signature tune “With a Song in My Heart” followed by “In Britain and in Germany it is 12 noon so at home and away it is time for Two Way Family Favourites”.

It is perhaps easy to forget that there was a time within living memory that communicating with a loved one was pretty much limited to letters and post cards.

Our first phone arrived only in the 1950s, and the line was shared with another family, but we were lucky because for most people making a telephone call meant a trip to the nearest public phone box while phoning from abroad might involve booking a call-in advance.

All of which meant that keeping in touch was down to writing either letters or the short picture postcard.

And with such limited access to communication often hearing of a relative’s illness was hit and miss.

But here the BBC stepped in with its SOS messages which were designed to alert families to an urgent emergencies, like "Will Mr and Mrs Little, last heard of eight months ago in the Birmingham area, head to Leeds General Infirmary where Mrs Little's mother is dangerously ill."

They weren’t frequent but even as a child when I heard one I was transfixed.  And in the same way when the BBC broadcast an appeal for information on a missing person.  

The radio audience, 1944

What strikes me now is that idea that someone could  have been “last heard of eight months ago in the Birmingham area” which with today’s level of knowledge and potential surveillance seems so remote.

I occasionally remember these messages and yesterday went liking for them, a search which led me to a BBC story, “The personal SOS messages the BBC used to send”, Kathleen Hawkins.**

Now I wont steal Ms. Hawkins story, all you have to do is follow the link, but as the story shows we still know so little about the service, even down to when it ended.

According the BBC piece, “It is not known when the messages ended, but it was at some point during the 90s, although BBC World Service continued the practice into the 21st Century. Mobile phones made them redundant, but for those who were directly affected by the SOS messages, my family included, they had a huge impact that lives on today".

I do remember that having grown up with them and  I caught myself thinking that I hadn’t heard an appeal for ages.

So there you are.  The SOS message my only be a tiny footnote in the history of British broadcasting but it’s a bit that serves to make a history and, in the process, offers up a vet small window on how we were.

Location; my past and yours

Pictures; 1950s elegance, News of the World's Household Guide and Almanac, courtesy of Debbie Cameron, advert for radios, 1949, from the collection of Graham Gill, radio listings from Saturday July 3rd, 1943, The Derby Evening Telegraph,  from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and group of young women, signing on for the industrial registration at the Derby Employment Exchange, August 9th, 1943, reproduced courtesy of the Derby Telegraph, January 2, 2013 

* “In Britain and in Germany it is 12 noon" .... One song ….. Two Way Family Favourites ….. and a different way of saying hello, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2025/10/in-britain-and-in-germany-it-is-12-noon.html

**“The personal SOS messages the BBC used to send”, Kathleen Hawkins, BBC News, May 15th, 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35815747

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 4........ a brick circa 1830

A short series featuring objects which tell a story of Chorlton in just a paragraph and  a challenge for people to suggest some that are personal to their stories.

As bricks go I do not think it looks very remarkable but then I suppose like most of us they are not things I tend to think much about.  But this one has a story.  The clay from which it was made may have come from just north of the village where clay and marl have been dug since at least the 17th century and it was part of a fine house which was probably built sometime between 1830 and 41.  The families who lived in it were comfortably well off and were important enough to have been listed in the local directories.  But like all but two from the same period it was demolished and we lost a link with our past.

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Tram jam .............. Oxford Road

Now, somewhere I have a complete collection of press cuttings about Manchester's new road scheme, which resulted in huge rush hour congestion on Oxford Street and Road in 1938.

Tram Jam, 1938

It was a bold plan which was simply called Manchester's No 9 Traffic scheme. 

And it was a one way system that "included Oxford Street, a part of Oxford Road, and Princess Street"*

It had been in operation for eight days, including two Sundays before  "unprecedented congestion of trams in Oxford Street in the morning and the delays later in the day in Princess Street and Grovesnor Street showed showed the necessity  for alterations to the system".

Now the picture has no date, so it may have been taken during the road traffic scheme or was just  a tram jam in the rush hour at some other time in the 1930s.

Manchester's number 9 traffic scheme, 1938

Location Oxford Road

Picture; Oxford Road, circa 1939, from the collection of Allan Brown

*Manchester's One Way Traffic Scheme, The Manchester Guardian, June 13th, 1938

Sugar sandwiches …. fruit salad ….. and carnation ……. food for the Gods

Well, while the young me thought I was in very heaven with sugar sandwiches I have to admit I never served them to my three when they were growing up.

The National Loaf, 1944

Nor do I think a bowl of tinned fruit with the obligatory splash of carnation milk would have been appreciated by any of them, but they were the backdrop to living in southeast London in the early 1950s.

To be fair I have yet to come across anyone else who ate sugar sandwiches.  The most common alternative I am told by friends was apple or banana sandwiches and I must admit apple did feature as alternative to sugar for me and my sisters.

They were quick to make, offered up that mix of sweetness and energy but even then, there was the drawback that the sugar granules crunched against your teeth and got lodged in the gaps created by the dentist.  I have still got those gaps from being an adolescent when Mr Guppy judged that as a boy, I would never be bothered about the appearance of my mouth.

But mercifully for my teeth there were also the savoury sandwiches, made with Pecks fish and meat paste and those magnificent dripping sandwiches.

In retrospect dripping sandwiches must have been a heart attack in waiting.  As veggie for over 40 years I shudder, but there was something magic on that mix of fat and salt and if you were lucky the dark brown liquid which lurked at the bottom of the pot.

But this is not a cry against what some would see as poor parenting or an attempt to outdo Eric down the road for the most deprived up bringing it was just part of our diet, and vied with healthy and nourishing soups, roasts and stews. 

I guess it was a throw back to mum’s childhood in the early 1930s when with granddad part of the millions of unemployed they were forced to apply for the Means Test which judged an application for help against what in the house could be sold to raise funds.

Fruit cocktail, 2025

The post war prosperity made that dark time a distant memory, but which always sat just below the surface and would occasionally surface.

Leaving aside the poverty aspect it was also a matter of “we did things differently back then”.

I never thought it odd that we would be served a pudding of spaghetti cooked with milk and sugar or that a delicacy in our house was chunks of corned beef dipped in batter and deep fried.

They were just what we ate and even now when me and my sisters get together we smile at the deep-fried corned beef which we nicknamed Dr Who’s because of the outlandish shapes the batter formed which reminded us of the monsters he confronted.

And then there was olive oil, bought in small bottles from the chemist and used on ear wax, or rubbing into the hair when mum had to use the knit comb.

Carnation, 2025

That said in the early 1950s the solution for me and my friends was that brutal haircut which left you looking like a recruit in a boot camp.

I must have other food memories but they as yet haven't tumbled out.

Against this since my mid 20s I have embraced cooking, leaving the procesed stuff behind and mastering a heap of dishes including the humble pasty.

But what is fascinating is just how quickly, the sugar and apple sandwiches and the medicinal application of olive oil vanished under the growing prosperity and commercialism of the late 1950s.  

So, in a few short years traditional puddings were replaced by such offerings as Angel Delight, and Arctic Roll, and baked fish by fish fingers and that staple which was Birds Eye burgers. And coming up fast there were those boil in the bag Vesta curries and Chow Mien.

And somewhere along the way we lost the Sunday treat of tinned fruit and carnation.

Me own efforts, 2026

Location; somewhere in the 1950s

Pictures, The Co-op National Loaf, 1944, Manchester & Salford Co-operative Herald, 1944, the alternative, the home made pasty, 2026 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and fruit salad and Carnation courtesy of Morrisons

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 3........ the tithe map 1845

A short series featuring objects which tell a story of Chorlton in just a paragraph and  a challenge for people to suggest some that are personal to their stories.

The tithe map perfectly captures a moment in our history.  Here were recorded the fields, buildings and roads in 1845.  But there is much more because the map and its accompanying schedule lists who owned the land, who they rented it to, the size of each field, its value and above all its use. It will also tell you who lived in the houses.

Now  we live facing the Recreation Ground and beside us was the Bowling Green Field, farmed by Samuel Gratrix, and owned by the Egerton’s.  It was an acre of arable farm land and its value was 3s 10d and directly opposite us was Row Acre which is now the Rec

Picture; by courtesy of Philip Lloyd

Looking for Dad at Eltham Fire Station in 1908

We will never know whether Lizzie’s aunt appreciated this picture postcard of our Fire Station.

But as she had been receiving regular such pictures of Eltham, I rather hope she did.

The added bonus was that there in the photograph was Lizzie’s Dad, which prompted Lizzie to ask “Do you recognise dad?

There is lots more detail but I rather think I will leave that up to you to search out.

Location; Eltham Fire Station











Picture; Eltham Fire Station,1908, courtesy of Tricia Leslie

Silly stories from a tram seat …… and other things wot I was taught

So yesterday afternoon I gave up my seat on the tram to an elderly woman, which prompted the man in front to offer his seat to me.

I declined, we all smiled at the sequence of events and then we got on with the journey.

But not for the first time it made me think of that old practice of giving up your seat to a woman or opening a door for people and taking the kerb side of the pavement when out with my wife.

Old fashioned, sexist or just downright stupid?

All are habits that are deeply ingrained in me, and I suspect are no longer common practice, judging by the number of elderly people I see standing on moving trams while people half their age sit comfortably, gazing out of the window tuned into their phones.

It may even be deemed by some as an insult, suggesting that there is something delicate about the woman and reinforcing my own stereotypical male assumptions about gender.

What of course makes it even a bit more absurd is that at 76 I may have just been older than the woman who graciously accepted the offer of my seat.

But there you are such things run deep in me and were acquired sometime in the 1950s.

Along with that equally powerful taboo of not spitting in the street.

Of course, in that pre antibiotic age when many diseases were far more prevalent and dangerous than today the notion of not spitting in public was both sensible from a hygienic standpoint and just good manners.

It was a custom underlined by those signs on public transport calling on people to refrain from spitting, which long ago were consigned to museums secreted away in the section titled “curious practices from the past”.

To which perhaps I am equally a “curious leftover from the past”.

One of those leftovers who can’t quite get used to total strangers at call centres addressing me by my first name, as if we were long standing intimate friends and not just conducting a conversation about a lost shopping order.

But I should stop before I wax lyrical about queues, waiting your turn at the bus stop or saying thankyou to the bus driver.

Location; the past

Picture; crowded tram bound for town from Cornbrook, 2024, at Market Street, 2018, and standing room only from St Peter's Square, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson